Ordinary plain old blog PLUS frequent reflections on "1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die" by Tom Moon (of NPR and other fames)

As gifts go, the better part of a day in a mean wind standing on a bunch of rocks will strike the average person as itself somewhat less appealing than a nice bottle of red and a $10 gift card at Blockbuster.

I was so happy when my wife gave me such a day. People who watch birds really are different.

I parked on top of Mount Wachusett. (There's a parking lot! Mountains don't have parking lots!) I got out and walked to the peakiest bit, the rocky outcrop where I saw the scopes set up and the people standing around and hoping. It's an odd feeling when you step into someone else's little ritual, a lot of someone elses' thing that they do, and there you are in an alien landcape on your own feet and walking but off balance. It would be like if someone showed up at a speech I was giving about search technology and they came up after and stood quietly and someone else asked me about, I don't know, Boolean Search versus Natural Language Query, and we talked for a while. They would see pieces, like the stitches scribbled on a baseball tumbling toward the batter, but not really comprehend.

I stood on the rock. A woman I met in the parking lot, affable and outgoing and the site coordinator, called out that everyone should call out any bird they saw. I looked around, and saw more Swarovski and Leica and Zeiss binoculars and scopes than I had EVER seen. Lovely bright glass. I carry Nikons, and they were dear. I show them to engineers and they look through them then hold them out a few inches and look at them like they're reading them. Somehow engineers like glass. But Leica! Swarovski! Zeiss! Oh my.

It took me a while to get used to the circle around us with the calling marks. "Near Joe English, left, streaming right, across Joe English, up two glasses from the horizon. Into the blue, the gray, across the cloud shaped like a, like a, like an arrowhead. Two Wings and a Sharpie." Which meant, left of a mountain called Joe English, moving right across it, up two diameters of a binoculars' viewing field from the horizon, across a cloud shaped like an arrowhead. (I never saw said cloud.) Crossing a blue section of sky, then a cloudy section, two broad-winged hawks and a sharp-shinned hawk.

That's the point of the day: The hawks. One goes to a hawkwatch to hold binoculars to his face until his eyesockets chafe while looking for hawks. From a venal perspective the idea is to see birds before others do. From the transcendent perspective, it's a chance to sneak into a massive, eldritch migration. If you hold the binoculars to your face long enough, you can see dots spinning in a vortex, which turn out to be broad-winged hawks, which have the good manners to stream overhead like revelation with rhinestones on it.

All the hawks move faster when they stream. They all hunch their shoulders and push their wrists behind them and hold onto their path like it was a wire. For hawks, they look wrong. But they absolutely define speed, and distance, and the burr of travel like a sharp needle dragged across glossy metal with a corkscrewing thread of filing spinning out behind.

Of course, transcendent is nothing. At one point I took my binoculars down and saw something closer. "Treeline!" I shouted. "Osprey!" And a fellow watcher looked. "Eagle," he corrected. Later he said, "Whoever saw the eagle, thank you! Otherwise it would have gotten by and we never would have seen it!" The man was wearing a sweater that looked like it came out of a footlocker except that the the loose weave was perfect and the color sublime, and his accent very nearly Brahmin. And when he thanked me I melted. I mean, just melted. And I said "You're welcome." Out loud. Which gave me time for the transcendent part.

The Norm is on the ropes. There's no worse news. This is bad news with extra colored sprinkles.

The Norm is a slick, sweet, bright comic. I've been reading The Norm since I found it on the King Features Web site about three years ago. The Norm -- the protagonist is Norm, a Guy With a Creative Bent and a Creative Job (until recently) -- is a sort of dandy sitcom, well written, filled with dialogue we wish we had said. It hasn't been quite as sharp since the sexual tension was lifted through fulfillment. There's way too many happy-married kiss jokes. These kiss jokes are, however, amply counterweighted by some fine in-law humor. And it's going to turn around in a Mad-About-You/Lucy-and-Desi way -- Norm and Reine (his wife) are to have a baby soon.

But the point is this: The Norm is better than all the TV you're watching. (It's better than all the TV I'm watching, anyway.) There's a cool ethic to it, an easy sway in its walk, a charming makes-it-too-easy scroll of a pen. AND IT'S FAILING. BUT IT DOES NOT HAVE TO. Jantze and King are parting ways, but there's a new chance for him.

We all need to go to the Web site and subscribe. Pay up: It's time to help the man out. Why? Because if you don't, you get no new stories. Straight value for product. He's funny; he's insightful. You need funny; you need insight. Pay up.

Joe and I were sitting in the car, listening to Steely Dan. And Hey Nineteen came on, and we started talking about the song, and the music, and I told him I heard it when I was a kid and listening to FM radio on a clock radio in my bedroom when I couldn't sleep. And that I didn't know at the time who the Queen of Soul was.

And he asked what the instrument was, and I told him a guitar, and we talked about the bass, and bass guitars. And I thought about my father, and how we sat in a car and listened to the Benny Goodman Orchestra play "Sing Sing Sing" and he explained clarinets to me, and the high C in the song, and I thought that was great. And now I think this is great. And maybe Joe does too.

All's I'm saying, as we said in college, is that The Beatles will live forever. "Hey Bulldog" just came across the greatest indie Internet-only radio station ever, and the chord progression just wormed its way in like a mean, hot little needle all over again. I said to Carol, "The Beatles will live forever" as she came into the room to do something, and she said, "Yep."

Later she heard me singing to myself while I got clothes out of the wardrobe. "Beastie Boys," I said. "Not going to live forever." And she said, "Nope."

I miss honeybees. Don't we all? Joe will grow up with their being rare, unless they pull a bald eagle and come back. Now we have mostly bumblebees, which is what the above is. I remember standing in my grandmother's backyard and watching a bee float around her nearly wild bed, with VERY yellow "saddlebags." They're a consolation prize, but a nice one. Their nests are a mystery to me. Yesterday I was ripping out old lilac roots and a bumblebee punched into the mulch under my feet like a digital special effect. Wishing him luck.

So I'm talking to Joe. And he asks about monsters, and whether they're real, which is a pretty regular theme in our conversations. And I say, no, there are some things called monsters, like gila monsters, but for the most part they aren't real and even things like gila monsters are just called that.

And he says, Why do they call them gila monsters?

And I say, Because they heal people. (Lame puns are to be used only with children.)

And he says, No, Daddy, that's not why they call them gila monsters. Gila monsters are lizards. They don't heal people.

And I say, yep, you're right.

And he says, It's because they though they had big heels. And he points to his foot. And I can't tell if he's the straight man, or I am.

Scott McCloudProbably the best-known thinker about comic strips/books/graphic novels/sequential art working right now. Controversial among comic fans but unequivocally an influential and original thinker.